Bishop met a server named Theresa Krause while cooking at the club. She had just moved to Vancouver after graduating from the University of Saskatchewan and the two got to know each other while taking scuba lessons in Deep Cove. After marrying in 1975, they rented a 12-acre farm outside Fort Langley for $150 a month. “It was ‘back to the land’ hippie stuff,” he says, “We had cattle and chickens, and Theresa kept a splendid garden.” They stayed there, enduring the long commute to the city, for nearly three years (a beautiful old farmer’s table still sits in the dining room of their west side home).

By 1975, Bishop was tiring of steak pies and cheese plates. He went to work for Umberto Menghi. The 10 years he spent there constitute the chapter in Bishop’s story on which all those that follow are predicated. He helped with Menghi’s cookbooks and ran the tiny kitchen with only a dishwasher and an assistant. These were fat times for Menghi; he and Bishop starred in well over 100 episodes of a cooking show called The Elegant Appetite. Reservations at Il Giardino were the most sought-after in town and the two men became our first celebrity chefs. “I’d get all the good letters,” Bishop giggles, remembering that Menghi used to remonstrate with him on camera: “‘Giovanni, what are you doing?’” he imitates, hands thrown up in mock frustration. “I was the downtrodden guy, always getting flack.” Bishop had definitely arrived, but a bad moon was rising.

When the economy tanked in the early 1980s, the restaurant tanked with it. It wasn’t long before Bishop had to run the front of house as well as the kitchen. As the stream of customers dwindled to a trickle, Menghi had to tighten further. “We all took a pay cut, ” Bishop remembers. “It was either that or you lost your job.” When Menghi’s new comptroller began to dictate how the place should be run, things got tense. One morning, a disagreement escalated into an argument and the comptroller threw Bishop out. He drove home, unsure what to do next. Menghi asked him to return, but as he sat outside in his green Saratoga, he “just couldn‘t do it. I’d have rather cut my own hand off.”

It was not a promising scenario. The economy was in a shambles, and Bishop had just walked out of the best restaurant in town. He had no idea what lay ahead. He called a good friend, Bud Sipko (a regular at Il Giardino), and confided in him. “What am I going to do?” he asked. Sipko’s response: “Open your own restaurant, John...don’t worry about the money. I’ll take care of that. Just come up with a concept and a menu.” Later that year, in the ramp-up to Expo 86, Bishop’s Restaurant was born, midwifed by a fresh approach to regional cuisine and $80,000 from John’s family and four dentists.

At the time Bishop was driven from Menghi’s organization, the vegetables and berries delivered each morning to Il Giardino had been grown in California and the veal flown in from Montreal. “We weren’t boycotting B.C. products,” he jokes. “It was just that if someone had asked us about ‘local’ back then, we would have laughed and said ‘local?’ The Okanagan and the Fraser Valley as we know them had yet to be invented. In his first year flying solo, Bishop served Norwegian scampi and Dover sole; there was but one B.C. wine on his list. Expo 86 changed everything.

It may have taken the fresh eyes of a Welshman to slowly reveal the worth and potential of our backyard, but it was the rest of the world that showed us how the Continental traditions could cramp our style. Following Expo, Vancouver restaurateurs like Bishop and Janice Lotzkar (of Raintree fame) began to abandon the familiar in favour of new flavours and new techniques. Above all, they embraced menu ideas and sourcing principles that were anchored in our local geography, abandoning their stubborn commitment to ancient recipes. In the 21 years since Vancouver feted the globe, our city has witnessed the complete overhaul of our culinary genome. Bishop’s was at the vanguard of this transformation.

If the Asian influx of the 1990s irreversibly enlivened our food culture, and more recent questions of globalization and sustainability changed the way we think about our restaurants, it was the arrival of Bishop’s that set the table. Much of what Vancouver diners gloat about when they entertain out-of-towners these days can be traced back to its launch. However you describe the fare at Bishop’s (and now at so many other restaurants in the city)—Contemporary West Coast, Pacific Northwest, or West Coast Seasonal—each moniker is a shoot from the same tree. And the roots of that tree can be found under the floor of John Bishop’s small kitchen on West Fourth.

BACK

PAGE: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

CONTINUE